The on going sustained boom in the pharmaceutical as well as the health care industries is creating a huge demand for pharmacy technicians in the industry. As a pharmacy expert you will have the opportunity to work under the supervision of pharmacists, and learn to fill prescriptions as well as dosages, including counting and measuring medicines in accordance with the doctors’ prescriptions.You will also be trained in handling a wide range of tasks including maintaining inventory and client records, and taking care of customer transactions and insurance related issues. Pharmacy expert make sure that people get the right medicines, and also ensure the smooth functioning of the pharmacy.In addition to helping pharmacists in their work, a pharmacy technician student must possess strong communication, customer service, and organizational skills along with good mathematical and reading abilities. You must have the ability to get information across to clients and pharmacists correctly and quickly. A pharmacy expert sometimes performs general tasks such as answering customer phone calls; stocking shelves, labeling bottles, counting pills; and other clerical duties as defined by the pharmacist.If you wish to be a successful pharmacy technician then you will need to attend a pharmacy technician career school in order to obtain the appropriate education and training. Various community colleges and vocational schools provide training programs; their duration ranges anywhere from six months to two years. Most programs cover subjects such as pharmacy law and regulations, pharmaceutical calculations, pharmaceutical terminology and techniques, record keeping and other functions related to pharmacies.The Pharmacy Expert Program also provides students with extensive hands-on training in addition to classroom instruction so that students are prepared for their job tasks, and can hit the ground running. Sufficient training will help you gain entry-level positions in hospitals, doctor’s clinics, nursing homes, retail stores and medical centers.Skilled and licensed technicians can get promoted to supervisors or even pharmacists if they choose to go to college to get a degree in Pharmacy. Your salary largely depends on your experience, education and place of employment. Pharmacy Technicians who attend an accredited institute have a leg up as they possess the skills to perform the job efficiently, and Certified Pharmacy Technicians and are usually able to find jobs easily.According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, this field should experience strong growth over the next decade. With an aging population and an increase in chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity, the demand for pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians, is expected to experience strong and steady growth well into the future.
Skin Care Specific For Men Who Want to Look Well-Groomed With Little Fuss
Men’s interest in taking care of their skin is steadily increasing. They are also aware of the importance of using safe natural ingredient products. It is not new for men to want to look well groomed. Now they are seeking healthy products to feed their skin in order to maintain a fresh attractive appeal.Men want a no-fuss, straight forward approach to skin care. They don’t need the pretty bottles or sweet aroma of fragrant lotions and cleansers-men want the basics. Skin care can be tailored specifically to a man’s needs without added synthetic ingredients that are found in many products. Using the purity of nature to enhance the skin’s surface a can makes a healthier skin care routine simple.Men’s skin care needs are specific partly as a result of shaving, which not only irritates the skin, it can leave pores open to invite clogging or blackheads. Therefore methods of cleansing are especially important to a man’s skin care regime.Whether your skin tends to be oily or dry and sensitive it requires care that will encourage it toward balance. Working with natural ingredient products that are formulated to assist the skin to find its proper balance will bring the desired results of smooth, fresh attractive looking skin.Simple Steps to healthy looking attractive skin:Step 1: CleansingCleansing for men needs to be gentle, even soothing, yet cleanse deep. This can be accomplished with a clay or cream cleanser that caters to Men’s skin care needs – irritation, large pores, oily or dry-sensitive skin. Synthetic chemicals are harsh on the skin. They can strip and irritate your skin or cause clogged pores.Scrubs can be cleansers that gently exfoliate. A scrub removes dry dead skin cells encouraging the development of new healthy skin cells. This also minimizes fine lines. The result is a smooth healthy looking skin surface. Be careful of rough scrubs as they can irritate and damage the skin’s surface. (recommended use is 2 times per week)Mud Masks are effective for deep cleansing and toning of skin’s surface and pores. A quality Dead Sea Mud Mask will replenish valuable mineral nutrients to the skin while removing impurities. It can help prevent ingrown hairs and blackheads from forming. (recommended use is 1- 2 times per week, depending on your individual skin)
The harsh effect of shaving can leave the skin with a dull appearance. A facial scrub or mask used as a gentle exfoliating product will bring a smooth toned healthy appearance to your skin.Step 2: ShaveShaving Cream Shaving can irritate the skin, cause bumps and enlarged pores which can lead to clogged pores or black heads. Always cleanse your face well with steamy water before you shave, and go with the grain. Shaving creams that are made with nature’s ingredients can be formulated to sooth and condition the skin while you shave. They should be made without toxic foaming agents and other harsh synthetic chemicals that can cause irritation.
After Shave – Toner – After shaving it is good to apply an After Shave Toner to soothe irritations from shaving. This is a final aspect of cleansing as well as a primary aspect of hydrating and toning the pores. Note: avoid alcohol- based aftershaves, they will irritate your skin.Step 3: MoisturizeMoisturizers for Men – A quality moisturizer cream should be light on the skin yet rich with replenishing skin care ingredients that also hydrate and protect the skin. Properly selected botanical extracts and essential oils will provide excellent healthy skin care benefits. These ingredients do not have overpowering scents that linger. They are gentle to the skin and subtle to the nose. Moisturizer creams that are made with plant extracts only, will have no scent for those who prefer products that have no aroma.Eye Cream – The area around the eyes tends to show signs of aging, appearing dry, devitalized and wrinkled sooner than the rest of the face. Therefore caring for the area around the eyes can make the most significant improvement in appearance, keeping you looking fresh, healthy and attractive. The eye area has the most sensitive skin. It is essential to use a quality eye cream that is free of harmful synthetic ingredients.Specific concerns:dark circles – under the eyes can make you look tired, devitalized or older. Although this is more likely related to nutrition, digestion or stress, there are safe plant ingredients that can blended in eye creams to help dissipate the dark circles.aging skin – may appear dry with fine or deep wrinkles and lacking good tone and elasticity. The key to restoring your skin’s appearance is care with products that will replenish and revitalize your skin. The 3 simple steps that have been outlined above are designed for this purpose.dry- sensitive – often feels tight and can flake. Should not be treated with harsh cleansers, harsh exfoliates or astringent products, as frequent use of such products will interfere with the skin’s natural oils that are essential to healthy skin. Basic care with soothing, replenishing and balancing (1) cleanser, (2) after shave toner and (3) moisturizer will restore your skin to its proper health and balance.oily skin – typically shiny, greasy, may have visible pores and be acne-prone. It is important to use a mild yet effective facial cleanser. Many cleansers are harsh and strip your skin of its natural oils. This dries the skin which in turn causes increased oil production.combination skin – characterized by an oily T-zone, forehead, nose and chin while other areas are normal or dry. Balancing and conditioning the skin is the essential focus for this skin type. Basic care with soothing replenishing and balancing (1) cleanser, (2) after shave toner and (2) moisturizer will restore your skin to its proper health and balance.breakout prone – Besides keeping oil production in check it is important to keep your pores toned (tight) to prevent trapping oil and dirt. A quality Dead Sea Mud mask can be effective for toning enlarged pores. It will also cleanse deep, it is without drying, and condition the skin leaving it smooth and revitalized.blackheads – Ask Eve to send you her blackhead removal process. Follow this up with regular dead sea mud masks to keep your pores toned to help prevent new blackheads from forming.The beauty of working with nature’s plants is that when chosen properly specific plants have an extensive range of benefits. It is as likely for one plant to assist dry skin as it is to assist oily skin to find its proper balance while at the same time be beneficial for normal skin. Additionally, a plant that is known for its sebum balancing properties may also specialize in toning, softening or improving the circulation of the skin. As unusual as this may seem, this is just one of the many advantages of working with plant ingredients.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.